i. 9. Explosion Piece
Installation
Explosion Piece
Explosion Piece is a physical installation and print publication that began as a series of instructions for the intervention into an existing object:
1. Begin with something whole.
2. Blow it up into as many pieces as possible without letting the newly separate parts lose all meaning.
3. Consider this new state of chaos.
4. Collect the fragments.
5. Re-order them to create something new.
This prompt informed a series of physical interventions in books that were taken out of library circulation and later reinstalled in the space. Each book was itself an archive—a furniture encyclopedia, an antique collection catalog, a museum inventory list, a book of paintings from a museum collection—that was then deconstructed, rearranged, or transformed somehow.
The new archive that emerged from these interventions into the codex asks how meaning can be (re)made when texts and images are remixed and reassembled in new ways. Explosion Piece interrogates the book as an artifact and container of knowledge, and explores the human impulse to collect, preserve, order, and archive in order to make sense of the world.
This project was installed in the RISD Fleet Library in May 2023 and featured multiple exploded book objects and a one-minute stop-motion video. It also includes a print publication with still photographs of the pieces.
—Installation (deconstructed books, CRTV, aluminum tables)
—Print Publication (closed): 11” x 17”